The Internet's Gilded Age | Hacker News Reader

The Internet's Gilded Age

potaroo.net

58 pointsjboynyc8 comments

The Author (Geoff Huston) also presented this thesis in a talk during APRICOT 2017, highly recommended to watch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FI7rRfNI8u4&t=46m17s

My perspective is different, as a resident of San Francisco, while Huston is a scientist in Australia. Though, I think he is essentially right.

These new Internet businesses employ fewer people than the industries that they displace, but these are American jobs they are creating. For (unspecified) reasons the US has a high amount of entrepreneurship, so that a web site running from a desktop in a dorm room can shortly become an international power. The top 5 or so most valuable companies in the world are all American.

When we want a list of the gilded age Internet companies, they are all American. This makes regulation a bit tricky. Germany is trying to regulate Google; where is the German Google? The only competitors are in China and Russia, where the government outright banned Google and Facebook.

This is also a challenge for America. It’s better for us for the jobs to be American, but I don’t want to kill the entrepreneurship. Hillary Clinton told the coal miners to go back to school and reenter the work force with new jobs. They revolted and voted for Donald Trump.

There are large, multinational companies not in the us, maybe they aren't in the top 5 in market cap, perhaps because a bunch of them are state owned (like the forthcoming saudi 'public company' oil company. It will be up there, but I don't see them being listed for their desired 2 trillion market cap.

So basically the head of APNIC is saying "we have a problem: private control of public services". A familiar issue.

If CDNs are so powerful I wonder why they're paying broadband ISPs instead of vice versa.

To clarify, the author uses CDNs to indicate the content silos that are goog, appl, amzn, fb, etc., which is not traditional usage.

But in light of this, I see him as essentially correct. Any one of them could demand payment from ISPs for their content (their endusers would revolt otherwise). The new willingness to dismantle "net neutrality" does not hurt any of them, only startups. And, as for the carriers, cablecos, telcos, etc, their window of monopoly is over, they should have invested in content when they had the chance.

Seriously, if my ISP was forced to have no Gmail tomorrow, I'd flip out, and change ISPs (thankfully I have that option).

Which is why even though I use gmail as an aggregator of my email accounts, that isn't my actual main email, as they are older than Google.

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